Before you start working on your research poster, the first thing to do is organize your text, images, graphs, charts, logos, etc. Managing your content ahead of time is the most important and often the most overlooked time-saving saving-part of the process.

Many research poster presentations are created from pre-existing documents such as multi-slide PowerPoint presentations or multi-page Word documents. Because these documents were initially created for other purposes, we recommend that you create a temporary rough draft document in Word and use it to paste all the text you are going to include on your poster presentation eventually. But don’t spend any time formatting the text at this point. Its only purpose is to help you organize and edit your poster content. Later on, you will use this document as the source from which you’ll be copying and pasting onto your poster.

Before copying any information on your draft document, create the following sections. These are standard sections for poster presentations and will help present your research clearly and professionally.

Standard scientific poster sections:
The poster title
The poster title is followed by author names and by the names of associated institutions.
Introduction, Background, or Abstract
Use the section to summarize your topic and to trigger the interest or your audience.
Materials and Methods or Process
In this section you were going to describe your process and will lead to your results.
Results
This will be the section where you will explain the results of your
Conclusions or Discussion
This is the section where you will explain why your results are conclusive and provide the reader with a short but solid justification of your hypothesis.
References or Literature Cited 
In this section where you list the literature, you have cited regarding this project. List the names of authors, publications, and publishing dates.
Acknowledgments are sometimes replaced by Contact Information.
This section is optional, but if you have the space, you can use it to thank the people who helped you with your project or provide your contact information.